Sarah Smart plays wanting without announcing it: a girl forever in the wrong garden, a detective at the next desk. Sally Wainwright wrote her the part that made her, and the crime series since have used her well without asking as much.
Fi1m perspective
Watch how often Virginia Braithwaite ends up in the garden next door. There is always a reason, something borrowed to give back, a question that could have waited, and Sarah Smart plays each one as if she half believes it herself. Her Virginia is in love with Megan Hartnoll, and everything we know about it comes from where she looks and where she chooses to stand. Sally Wainwright wrote the crush as a crush rather than an issue, and Smart was the right actor for that. She does not plead with the audience. She just keeps finding excuses to be in that garden.
It was the part that made her, and she has said so. She started young, in children's television on ITV in the early 1990s, then spent years as the girlfriend in other people's stories. "For ages I was just playing people’s girlfriends, but then Virginia in Braithwaites changed all that. I thought ‘I really like playing quirky characters’," she told the Birmingham Mail in 2012. Wainwright plainly agreed. She wrote her Carol Bolton in Sparkhouse (2002), a Heathcliff with the sexes swapped in a modern Wuthering Heights, and then the title role in Jane Hall (2006). Three parts from one writer is a proper working relationship, and it is the one that has done most for her.
Since then British television has mostly decided she is a detective. She was Anne-Britt Höglund across the nine BBC Wallander films (2008–2012), the colleague at the next desk to Kenneth Branagh, and she has passed through Death in Paradise (2011), New Tricks (2012), The Musketeers (2014), The Chelsea Detective (2022) and Father Brown (2023). We have not reviewed those and will not pretend to. The exception worth a look is Doctor Who (2011), where she played Jennifer Lucas and the copy of Jennifer Lucas, which is at least a part with something in it to play. "Reliable" is the word that follows her through this stretch, and reliable is what you call an actor nobody has written a lead for lately.
What stays with us is still the Braithwaites, and the reason is specific. A daughter's crush on the married woman next door, in a comedy about a lottery win, could have been played for farce or for a lesson. Smart and Julie Graham play it as two people being careful with each other, and it moved us more than we expected the show to manage, because nobody on screen made a speech about it. The later series ran short of secret and reached for incident, and the daughters, Smart included, were where that showed. Start with the first two. Then wait, as we are, for somebody other than Wainwright to work out what she can do.
Biography
Sarah Smart is an English actress. Born on 3 March 1977 in Birmingham, she began her career as a child actor in the television series Woof!.
She played Virginia Braithwaite in the comedy drama At Home with the Braithwaites (2000–2003). She has appeared in several productions written by Sally Wainwright, including Sparkhouse (2002) and Jane Hall (2006). Between 2008 and 2012 she played Anne-Britt Höglund in the BBC adaptations of Henning Mankell's Wallander novels. Other television credits include episodes of Doctor Who (2011), Midsomer Murders, Death in Paradise, The Musketeers and Father Brown.
Her mother is the scriptwriter Pat Smart.
